St Alia of the Knife
by AsianScaper
Summary: Alia tastes the prelude to abomination. Set before "Children of Dune" and based more accurately on the books. Note: this is an inquiry on fate, prescience, and godhood.


**Title:** _St. Alia of the Knife_   
**Author:** AsianScaper   
**Disclaimer:** Just borrowing; Frank Herbert owns everything.   
**Rating:** G   
**Category:** Drama/Angst   
**Spoilers:** None   
**Feedback:** Friends, enemies: Send your comments or constructive criticism to asianscaper@hotmail.com. Advice is highly sought after!   
**Summary:** Alia tastes the prelude to abomination. Note: this is an inquiry on fate, prescience and godhood.   
**Archiving:** Email me, and it will be allowed.   
**Dedication:** To Ria. I finally wrote an Alia piece, thank God. This one's for you, as its purpose is to please you and to maintain a promise I made. And of course, to the memory of Frank Herbert, for his compelling contribution to science fiction.   
**Author's Note:** Done posthaste. I'd honestly want to hear what you have to say about this piece. It was written as an essay, turned narrative, which was all too hard to do. Alia's a character I've finally found courage to write about. Took me two years! I'd have to admit that's it's more than just a little vague. I hope you find the seeds I've sowed. Enjoy! 

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_She felt as if the world had seeped through the ceiling, climbed unto the walls and taken refuge in the curtains, for they were dark, swinging, untiring things and the universe now, had turned into a monster, disturbed in sleep and severe in wakefulness. _

For as long as the wind blew, cold and harsh, she knew it was night and when finally, it stopped to deliver a draught of unspeakable heat, she knew it was day. But oh, how could anything be_ if none of these occurred now? _

Arrakis had maintained the power its name imprinted on the tongue. It was still a dry menace in the mouth, a slip of sweetness through the lips, an addiction. It was hateful, filled with more pain than mere folly would allow. People, in their bright search for that comfort of ease in power and strength, were seduced by it and tricked to tyranny. So many had fallen and had never risen further than their wants, their desires, their filthy love for all things beautiful –temporary, but beautiful. 

"Dune" however, that soft croon lovers named it with, was no more. 

There was moisture here. The dunes, their keepsakes mere shadows of what was, had receded and their golden sails flew through the horizon only in the deep desert, only in places where the sea of green had paused in its act of devouring. And that lack of thirst so prevalent now was what fed them, was what fed all of them, the children of the Fremen! 

And oh! How it rained! 

  
Had she dreamt? 

She started from her bed, her first breath of wakefulness both greedy and lacking. Hearing the desperation in the tone of her own gasp, she opened her eyes to darkness. Fear lurked nearby, and the voices that heralded it stood closely, but she maintained hope and certainty that everything was as it was. That nothing had changed as yet. Desperately, she blinked, praying for light, knowing that even without her vision, the sun must always rise. 

She gathered the sweat from her brow in a sweep of a fist, at once smiling in relief when the curtains were pushed aside by wind and moonlight walked past. Droplets shimmered for a moment, sliding to her wrist and under. 

But she sat staring at the hand wound tight in anger and frowned at the reflex. The lives in her, those violent, stubborn colors which never truly mingled like the palette to a painting, managed a small crow of protest as she forced her hand open and allowed the air to dry the moisture there. 

She had learned, long ago and presently, that water here was a curse and an ever-present source of appetite for more, a grail of greed. At once, it was also the blood that life drank from. That dream of abundance, when clouds became pregnant with rain was never reluctant. The Imperial Planetologist Kynes had done well to ensure that heresy. 

Ah, the future! It was always waiting, always anxious for harvest, always harvested with the sickle of spice. Spice! Why was she calculating the value of future and spice melange at such an unholy hour? Here, amidst dreams and voices, when nothing was certain, when mentats were not at hand to reveal the mathematics of behavior for her own consumption and release. 

Ah, ah, uncertainty was never good, she chided herself. A taste of prescience found that overlaying bed of what came after the present unbearable to look at when empty, god-like when filled. 

With fervor, she swung her legs aside, dismounting from her bed in a mixture of movements that proved a mobility seen only in the practices of the Bene Gesserit. 

In that state when her consciousness hung between sleep and wakefulness, the trance was always half-spent. There was panic and voices, voices and faces, lives upon millions of lives. Bending slightly, with a hand against one of the posts of her bed, she sighed in exhaustion at the shouts of each. 

Growling, she cried out in a hoarse tenor, "_Enough!_" and they were silenced. 

That peace lasted for a moment only, as if thunder had caused a fleeting muteness in a gathering crowd. Under the safety of exasperation, they rose again, first into a murmur then into a clamoring din that hauled sleep away from her. 

The Voice never worked on them. Never. It hurt her deeply to try. She pushed away from the bedpost, launching herself into the surrounding gloom. Standing there, for an instant, to assimilate the coolness, to find comfort and gaining none. 

She endeavored to spy on the musings of twilight; the day was always too painful to look at, seen from the eyes of so many who had already done things for the first time and she, doing all things twice! She was convinced that the song abroad, the clicks of crickets or the howling of winds bathing the corridors, would lull her to dreaming. Done, also and unfortunately, with a head rumbling with protests and assents. That was her trouble, she supposed. The noise it produced was that constant murmur of differences, of individuals! It kept her own thoughts to an insignificant murmur. 

Tonight, something was waiting to be found. An answer? Perhaps she could silence her ghosts with a mere word. Whether she uttered it or another did, mattered not. Answers were as often found within as they were without. Though she did not trust what lay between her ribs, behind her eyes, the consciousness inside the filtering cracks of her skull. It was all too possessed with something less –and more- than who she was. 

Possession. The thought made her tremble. 

_Come, Alia, don't delude yourself. You aren't mad. Not yet. _

But it is not madness, you fool! Abomination! –That state of dispossession when we lose ourselves and others gain us, a term we label so easily and with proper fear! 

"Oh, Paul," she whispered into her hands. "If you only knew…There is one path I am certain of, and I am terrified of it." 

She ran quickly through the doors of her room, into the marble corridors, marveling at the plasteel's ability to emulate and at once hateful of the images that accompanied it. They were of herself, and occupied the same nimble body, the same white shift cut fittingly sparse for the heat. 

"Alia!" 

She ran faster at the prompting of the voice, for it was firm with control. How flighty she was, to jump at the mere sound of her opposite! 

"Alia! Stop! Come here, and accompany me!" 

Her feet ceased their mad rhythm and those muscles that had suddenly obeyed her, wished mutiny; they wanted to run, to run from all this. 

She turned to rid of the feeling, suddenly warmed by the image that greeted her as she did so. 

Framed by pillars taller than most trees (what memory was this now, that she remembered lofty sentinels with globules of green in every spout of its limbs, a herald of water?) lined symmetrically from where he stood, waited a brother. He was straight and proud with hair sun-dried and motley in its array of brown and blonde. His beard was sparse, disturbed by a smile. It framed his face and was decidedly new, as if nights robbed of pillows were the cause. His eyes, lacking whites and shamelessly blue, had a piercing quality, an ability to read beyond patterns. 

He held out a hand, which was welcoming and familiar while draped in the fabric of the sietch. His robe hung loose and graceful, both detached and attached to his frame, like dunes against the body of the Arrakeen crust. His boots seemed old to his feet; sand was crusted there, hungry for the taste of his skin. To her delight and to the horror of the past, his clothes smelled strongly of spice. 

He had been walking through the streets. She knew that distinctly. He had the flavor of a city around him; he had been dipped in one and emerged listless. 

For her sake, he acted as if nothing had been amiss, that she had been walking plainly through the halls. He gestured for her to take his hand and she took it carefully, trying to fit her palm into his. 

She found it comforting to hold something weathered, by reason of his own time spent on living and worrying, rather than something made from memories alone. Often, she had felt the calluses in her own diminutive fists, as well as wounds only death could endure, while her memories ran away and were overtaken by others'. 

"Alia," her brother murmured gently, taking her into his arms. "Dreams always haunt us. Maybe, in all this, we'll find comfort in each other." 

He released her, looking into her face, discovering an adult concern, sorrow and confusion in an expression seasoned by seventeen summers only. So gently, as if to exorcise her of misgivings, he kissed her cheek, hoping to lighten her burden with his lips for they were warm and her skin was cold. Then, he tried to smile for her, without the offence of his office bright in his blue-within-blue eyes. He could not hide his own discontent though, and she returned the smile. His unabashed display of humanity collapsed the walls between them. 

"I always have, Paul. I have always found comfort, however small, in you." She still held his hand, shifting it from one palm to the other, if only to feel his sense of self, which she so sorely lacked. "But I find it so hard to deal with, all of this, despite the…many voices which speak their counsel and are never silent." 

He touched her cheek, wiping a tear with a rough thumb, as surprised as she that it had fallen so quickly. "We have become water-fat," he whispered. "That we have begun to shed water for ourselves. There's no blame to be had, to give. 

"Though we have no time for pity, Alia, no time for either of us. I regret that," he told her. "I solemnly wished that everything was different. Cowardly as that admission may be, it is a display of strength. You have to learn, sister, that admitting to fault can set you free and that amidst this path I've chosen to walk, it is fatal to be free." He chuckled silently, his short hair stirred by the breeze, humored by him. "Don't hunger for prescience, that route through a garden of plenty only to eat one fruit and die of it. Never! I should think, Alia, that you of all people would know what I speak of." 

He met her eye, as if his words would pour down more quickly, more thoroughly, with that act of impatience, into her cup. Then, as if another thought had occurred to him, he began to walk with long, soft strides, arriving at a flight of stairs and negotiating the steps. His robes flared behind him, flowing into each other, wings of spice fiber that gave the illusion he was flying. Soon, he was ahead of her as she followed blindly, hoping that he heralded the destruction of her ignorance. 

"We're all fools, Paul," she suddenly said, after the footfalls became unbearable to hear. 

"It suits you, your pessimism," he replied. 

"It must." 

"That is when you are wrong, Alia. We are not fools by essence. It is only in how we execute our deeds and how we see things that turn us to blustering idiots." He stopped then, at the foot of the steps, attracted by the flicker of lights beyond the vertical obscurity of plasteel. Then he resumed his flight, shifting directions, his robes floundering to keep up. Alia moved with more surety, the aggregate of memories guiding her limbs. 

The balcony, which the Atreides chose to perch on, was wide, stretching a quarter of a kilometer, yawning over the city streets with teeth of gold. Paul stepped past the pillars, haunted by the blackness beyond the flickering lights, where men ended and desert began. Reluctantly, he also discovered that the wind was never gentle here. Flags and robes rippled unceasingly, fed by wind and watered by dryness. 

The city itself was creeping with smoke and shadow, insipidly quenched of thirst by the dawning of wealth and the technology that wealth brought with it. 

"Look at all this," he said, sweeping a hand over the scene, his brows knitting together. "They call me a god. But what is definition? What is it but a moving, changing thing, and oftentimes, a defeat of its own name? One belief stated –and this I have borrowed from memories of long ago - that a god is never subject to change. Then if so, it would be foolish for men to say that a god is said to be a man. A man is always ravaged by the passing of time. I am only an aspect of the divinity he shares in." He laughed. "We all are." 

"But come," he admonished. "That is what truly frightens those who can see through the veil of the present and into the future. We become masters of fate and slaves to it when finally we look destiny in the eye. There is no escape for us, for me. It is always horrible to be dispossessed of our own processes, of our own ability to assent and dissent. Here and now, it is fatal for me, to be free." 

Alia stared at her brother. "Then you understand…" 

"Abomination?" He glanced at her, his blue-in-blue eyes washing over her, as if searching for any sign of foreignness and endeavoring to cleanse it. "Once you start fearing, Alia, it will come. Fear is the mind-killer; it is that little death… When you have been numbed by it, you will feel puissant. And yet, you will also lack the control to impose anything upon yourself. Remember faults and limits and the ability to confess. Remember freedom and the steerage of self." 

"Very well," she said, rubbing her hands against her arms, feeling the skin there that oftentimes did not feel like her own. The wind had nipped her skin to ice and she withdrew, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing with fondness. "Good night. I've heard enough and thank you." 

"Good night, Alia." He did not care to look at her or to bid her farewell, only that his words allowed for her to stay if she wished. The voice that spoke was warm and sincere in its wishes of goodwill. It was enough to sustain her to leave and traipse through the silent, empty corridors of the palace. 

A brother that loved her was always enough. 

When she finally entered her room, the drapes of her bed caressing her skin as if they had missed her company amongst the sheets, she prepared herself for sleep. Her quarters, which was a mausoleum of now-ness, of being alive presently, cast strange, unfathomable shadows, like the unfamiliar visions prescience gave her through the spice trance. Again, she saw herself looking farther and farther into an open plain, confronted by emptiness and images that swam against a thick, opaque veil. 

If only she could see the silhouettes, then the lines, then the plane, then the dimension and details of those images! At that instigating lament for what she could not do, her senses turned gaunt and cold, like a lonely ghost's. 

And often she had felt this, she realized. Utterly alone. 

Infinitely afraid. 

__________ 

**-The End-**


End file.
